Chien Ching is a life-long believer in experiential learning which involves inculcating a curious, open and critical mind-set in viewing situations from multiple perspectives, based on evidence. Through conversations with students, academics and industry players in various settings, she continuously improves the relevance of the curriculum she develops for accountancy and engineering students in public and private universities. Her areas of interests are in technical communication, professional communication, visual communication, career and professional development, and strategy and self-regulation instruction. Chien Ching has a PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology, a Masters in Education and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Writing. She has been involved in the accreditation exercise for engineering programs and is a reviewer of five SSCI journals. She is also a certified Job and Career Development Coach and Job and Career Transition Coach.
AHAVA Hotel Singapore served the boutique hotel segment. Rather than focusing on market segments ... more AHAVA Hotel Singapore served the boutique hotel segment. Rather than focusing on market segments in Singapore’s hotel chain scale system, the management had decided to offer guests an affordable luxury experience via excellent personalized service while capitalizing on the rich and authentic cultural heritage that the hotel offered in terms of history and design. Although AHAVA Hotel had won the Best Hotel Service award three years consecutively, it was getting harder to distinguish itself from other boutique hotels and to align itself with the parent company’s (Signature Company) strategic long-term goals.
In this study, 36 engineering students who were taking a course on effective communication used g... more In this study, 36 engineering students who were taking a course on effective communication used graphic organizers to prepare their draft for a writing task. This was followed by a review by peers and the teacher. As students often have difficulties constructing knowledge ...
Nanyang Technological UniversityWriting is a complex process. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) cat... more Nanyang Technological UniversityWriting is a complex process. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) categorise poor and expertwriters according to the type of writing they do. Poor writers are likely to use theknowledge telling strategy where students think and write whatever comes to their mind.Their writing reflects their train of thought rather than an understanding of the train ofthought of the reader. Expert writers however, use the knowledge transforming strategy.They show an awareness of an overall plan or goal which they develop within the problemconstraints given to meet their readers’ needs. Graphic organisers have often been used tohelp students plan their writing but not to revise their writing in the pre-writing stage.Based on the premise that students can revise better if they can see better what they arerevising, this paper provides the theoretical underpinnings to show that graphic organiserscould be useful revising tools in the pre-writing stage and guidelines on the effe...
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2017
This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educatio... more This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educational paths in Singapore of desired graduate attributes by employers. Research questions: (1) Do graduates from the polytechnic and junior college paths have similar perceptions with regard to the ranking of desirable graduate attributes? (2) If not, in what ways are their perceptions different? Literature review: A review of literature on employers' ranking of desirable graduate attributes revealed mismatches in employers' and graduates' rankings. There has not been any published study on student awareness of employability skills in Singapore in particular. Hence, this study investigated the perceptions of final-year engineering students from two different educational paths of their ranking of graduate attributes. Methodology: The students were asked to rank eight attributes and explain their ranking from an employer's perspective. Results: The findings show that communication, teamwork, and problem-solving were ranked the top three desirable attributes by both groups of students. However, polytechnic students seem to reflect greater familiarity and confidence in tackling workplace requirements compared to junior college students. The implications of the findings are presented.
Low English proficiency students have difficulty making their writing coherent. They tend to to b... more Low English proficiency students have difficulty making their writing coherent. They tend to to be more concerned with language matters rather than making meaning. This may be because they do not have a mental representation of their writing. Tree diagrams help students to ...
– This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educat... more – This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educational paths in Singapore on desired graduate attributes by employers. Research questions: 1) Do graduates from the polytechnic and junior college paths have similar perceptions with regard to the ranking of desirable graduate attributes? 2) In what ways are their perceptions different? Literature review: A review of literature on employers' ranking of desirable graduate attributes revealed mismatches in employers' and graduates' rankings. There has not been any published study on student awareness of employability skills in Singapore in particular. Hence, this study investigated the perceptions of final-year engineering students from two different educational paths on their ranking of graduate attributes. Methodology: The students were asked to rank eight attributes and explain their ranking from an employer's perspective. Results: The findings show that communication, teamwork and problem-solving were ranked the top three desirable attributes by both groups of students. However, polytechnic students seem to reflect greater familiarity and confidence in tackling workplace requirements compared to junior college students. The implications of the findings are presented.
Students were asked to use graphic organizers for three writing processes i.e. categorizing and e... more Students were asked to use graphic organizers for three writing processes i.e. categorizing and extracting information, integrating information and drawing conclusions. They were given the choice of two organizers for each process, one which offered the perceptual operations of computational offloading, re-representation and constraining and one which did not. The results of the pilot study show that students consistently chose to use organizers which offered perceptual operations. In addition, students used the organizers most to categorize and extract information as opposed to the other two processes.
Writing instruction has often neglected the personal and strategy variables. It has also often ne... more Writing instruction has often neglected the personal and strategy variables. It has also often neglected students' relationship need as writing is often done alone. An actual classroom implementation of strategy and self-regulation instruction was carried out to find out whether instruction would help students to plan and revise their essays and if students had the competence and ability to regulate their writing, would it improve their attribution, self-efficacy and self-determination. Findings suggest that strategy and self-regulation instruction has equipped students with the knowledge on how to plan and revise their essays. This improvement is mainly due to the utilization of four self-regulation variables: self-evaluation, organizing and transforming, seeking information and seeking social assistance. Furthermore, strategy and self-regulation has improved students' self-efficacy. After instruction, they responded more positively to negative feedback. Strategy and self-regulation instruction also helped to improve students' self-determination. Students realized that writing more would not improve their writing unless they were able to diagnose their mistakes. Therefore, more students sought peer help after instruction. Strategy and self-regulation instruction did not have an obvious effect on attribution. This was probably because students already have good attribution. Nearly all the students quoted ability and effort as the cause of their success. They also believed that intelligence was developmental and so had a desire to improve themselves.
Checklists are often used as measurements or guidelines to determine how far you have met the tas... more Checklists are often used as measurements or guidelines to determine how far you have met the task requirement. Another seldom realized good use of checklists is as a pro-active measure to "standardise" content. This tool is especially useful for courses that are project-based, that require students to do research before writing their product.
Teachers are often hard-pressed for time in the classroom. They have to finish the syllabus on ti... more Teachers are often hard-pressed for time in the classroom. They have to finish the syllabus on time so that students will be prepared to take the respective examinations. It is difficult to have formative assessments on a weekly basis as it would not only add to the students' stress level but also the teacher's marking load. However, it would be very useful if the teacher could have a reflective gauge of the students' understanding of the lessons learnt weekly so that appropriate steps could be taken sooner to address any relevant concerns raised. This case study details how concept maps were used to gauge students' understanding in a writing class.
The number of years of education that a student has gone through is no indication of his ability ... more The number of years of education that a student has gone through is no indication of his ability to write. Many university students write incomprehensibly. These "novice" writers adopt different writing strategies as opposed to expert writers. Research provides a profile of the novice writers to help us understand how they approach the writing task and how we could help them overcome the problem. The challenge in teaching them was that they came from different educational backgrounds and have been through many years of education. Although they were good in their science subjects, their English proficiency was weak. So how could they be helped to understand why their writing was not comprehensible? How could they be made to see that writing was more than just grammar? The author decided to concentrate on helping them "see" what they are writing using a tree diagram. It was felt that using a tree diagram would be more helpful than an outline as the tree diagram could show the hierarchical relationship between ideas in a paragraph or essay. This would provide both the teacher and students with a common and visible mental representation to discuss.
This paper aims to find out two outcomes of feedback in the novice writers’ graphic organizers, w... more This paper aims to find out two outcomes of feedback in the novice writers’ graphic organizers, which are: the novice writers’ ability to align their ideas to their writing goal, and their perceived germane, metacognitive, extraneous and intrinsic cognitive loads when generating and revising ideas based on the feedback. Data was gathered from the students’ graphic organizers, mental difficulty questionnaires and focus group discussion. The findings show that the students’ relevance of ideas improved with feedback in their organizers, except for one sub-process. In addition, the students’ metacognitive load seems to affect the amount of ideas generated. These findings have implications for media selection mix and social collaborative environments.
AHAVA Hotel Singapore served the boutique hotel segment. Rather than focusing on market segments ... more AHAVA Hotel Singapore served the boutique hotel segment. Rather than focusing on market segments in Singapore’s hotel chain scale system, the management had decided to offer guests an affordable luxury experience via excellent personalized service while capitalizing on the rich and authentic cultural heritage that the hotel offered in terms of history and design. Although AHAVA Hotel had won the Best Hotel Service award three years consecutively, it was getting harder to distinguish itself from other boutique hotels and to align itself with the parent company’s (Signature Company) strategic long-term goals.
In this study, 36 engineering students who were taking a course on effective communication used g... more In this study, 36 engineering students who were taking a course on effective communication used graphic organizers to prepare their draft for a writing task. This was followed by a review by peers and the teacher. As students often have difficulties constructing knowledge ...
Nanyang Technological UniversityWriting is a complex process. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) cat... more Nanyang Technological UniversityWriting is a complex process. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1987) categorise poor and expertwriters according to the type of writing they do. Poor writers are likely to use theknowledge telling strategy where students think and write whatever comes to their mind.Their writing reflects their train of thought rather than an understanding of the train ofthought of the reader. Expert writers however, use the knowledge transforming strategy.They show an awareness of an overall plan or goal which they develop within the problemconstraints given to meet their readers’ needs. Graphic organisers have often been used tohelp students plan their writing but not to revise their writing in the pre-writing stage.Based on the premise that students can revise better if they can see better what they arerevising, this paper provides the theoretical underpinnings to show that graphic organiserscould be useful revising tools in the pre-writing stage and guidelines on the effe...
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2017
This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educatio... more This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educational paths in Singapore of desired graduate attributes by employers. Research questions: (1) Do graduates from the polytechnic and junior college paths have similar perceptions with regard to the ranking of desirable graduate attributes? (2) If not, in what ways are their perceptions different? Literature review: A review of literature on employers' ranking of desirable graduate attributes revealed mismatches in employers' and graduates' rankings. There has not been any published study on student awareness of employability skills in Singapore in particular. Hence, this study investigated the perceptions of final-year engineering students from two different educational paths of their ranking of graduate attributes. Methodology: The students were asked to rank eight attributes and explain their ranking from an employer's perspective. Results: The findings show that communication, teamwork, and problem-solving were ranked the top three desirable attributes by both groups of students. However, polytechnic students seem to reflect greater familiarity and confidence in tackling workplace requirements compared to junior college students. The implications of the findings are presented.
Low English proficiency students have difficulty making their writing coherent. They tend to to b... more Low English proficiency students have difficulty making their writing coherent. They tend to to be more concerned with language matters rather than making meaning. This may be because they do not have a mental representation of their writing. Tree diagrams help students to ...
– This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educat... more – This study aimed to provide insights on the perceptions of engineering students from two educational paths in Singapore on desired graduate attributes by employers. Research questions: 1) Do graduates from the polytechnic and junior college paths have similar perceptions with regard to the ranking of desirable graduate attributes? 2) In what ways are their perceptions different? Literature review: A review of literature on employers' ranking of desirable graduate attributes revealed mismatches in employers' and graduates' rankings. There has not been any published study on student awareness of employability skills in Singapore in particular. Hence, this study investigated the perceptions of final-year engineering students from two different educational paths on their ranking of graduate attributes. Methodology: The students were asked to rank eight attributes and explain their ranking from an employer's perspective. Results: The findings show that communication, teamwork and problem-solving were ranked the top three desirable attributes by both groups of students. However, polytechnic students seem to reflect greater familiarity and confidence in tackling workplace requirements compared to junior college students. The implications of the findings are presented.
Students were asked to use graphic organizers for three writing processes i.e. categorizing and e... more Students were asked to use graphic organizers for three writing processes i.e. categorizing and extracting information, integrating information and drawing conclusions. They were given the choice of two organizers for each process, one which offered the perceptual operations of computational offloading, re-representation and constraining and one which did not. The results of the pilot study show that students consistently chose to use organizers which offered perceptual operations. In addition, students used the organizers most to categorize and extract information as opposed to the other two processes.
Writing instruction has often neglected the personal and strategy variables. It has also often ne... more Writing instruction has often neglected the personal and strategy variables. It has also often neglected students' relationship need as writing is often done alone. An actual classroom implementation of strategy and self-regulation instruction was carried out to find out whether instruction would help students to plan and revise their essays and if students had the competence and ability to regulate their writing, would it improve their attribution, self-efficacy and self-determination. Findings suggest that strategy and self-regulation instruction has equipped students with the knowledge on how to plan and revise their essays. This improvement is mainly due to the utilization of four self-regulation variables: self-evaluation, organizing and transforming, seeking information and seeking social assistance. Furthermore, strategy and self-regulation has improved students' self-efficacy. After instruction, they responded more positively to negative feedback. Strategy and self-regulation instruction also helped to improve students' self-determination. Students realized that writing more would not improve their writing unless they were able to diagnose their mistakes. Therefore, more students sought peer help after instruction. Strategy and self-regulation instruction did not have an obvious effect on attribution. This was probably because students already have good attribution. Nearly all the students quoted ability and effort as the cause of their success. They also believed that intelligence was developmental and so had a desire to improve themselves.
Checklists are often used as measurements or guidelines to determine how far you have met the tas... more Checklists are often used as measurements or guidelines to determine how far you have met the task requirement. Another seldom realized good use of checklists is as a pro-active measure to "standardise" content. This tool is especially useful for courses that are project-based, that require students to do research before writing their product.
Teachers are often hard-pressed for time in the classroom. They have to finish the syllabus on ti... more Teachers are often hard-pressed for time in the classroom. They have to finish the syllabus on time so that students will be prepared to take the respective examinations. It is difficult to have formative assessments on a weekly basis as it would not only add to the students' stress level but also the teacher's marking load. However, it would be very useful if the teacher could have a reflective gauge of the students' understanding of the lessons learnt weekly so that appropriate steps could be taken sooner to address any relevant concerns raised. This case study details how concept maps were used to gauge students' understanding in a writing class.
The number of years of education that a student has gone through is no indication of his ability ... more The number of years of education that a student has gone through is no indication of his ability to write. Many university students write incomprehensibly. These "novice" writers adopt different writing strategies as opposed to expert writers. Research provides a profile of the novice writers to help us understand how they approach the writing task and how we could help them overcome the problem. The challenge in teaching them was that they came from different educational backgrounds and have been through many years of education. Although they were good in their science subjects, their English proficiency was weak. So how could they be helped to understand why their writing was not comprehensible? How could they be made to see that writing was more than just grammar? The author decided to concentrate on helping them "see" what they are writing using a tree diagram. It was felt that using a tree diagram would be more helpful than an outline as the tree diagram could show the hierarchical relationship between ideas in a paragraph or essay. This would provide both the teacher and students with a common and visible mental representation to discuss.
This paper aims to find out two outcomes of feedback in the novice writers’ graphic organizers, w... more This paper aims to find out two outcomes of feedback in the novice writers’ graphic organizers, which are: the novice writers’ ability to align their ideas to their writing goal, and their perceived germane, metacognitive, extraneous and intrinsic cognitive loads when generating and revising ideas based on the feedback. Data was gathered from the students’ graphic organizers, mental difficulty questionnaires and focus group discussion. The findings show that the students’ relevance of ideas improved with feedback in their organizers, except for one sub-process. In addition, the students’ metacognitive load seems to affect the amount of ideas generated. These findings have implications for media selection mix and social collaborative environments.
Final-year engineering project reports are supervised year-long projects that undergraduate stude... more Final-year engineering project reports are supervised year-long projects that undergraduate students undertake before graduation. Project guidelines are provided but they are often brief, taking into account the diversity of projects undertaken even within a certain discipline. This paper investigates an important part of engineering reports, which is the table of contents (TOC). The value of the TOC as a teaching tool is often not recognized by students and supervisors as the TOC is written after the entire report has been finalized. This paper suggests however that the TOC, with its headings and subheadings, is a useful tool to facilitate faster and clearer analysis of moves and steps by subject experts, language teachers and students. Past studies have focused on analyzing the moves in research articles rather than on moves in final-year project reports. This paper maps the TOC in 30 final-year materials science engineering reports against Kanoksilapatham’s (2015) textual analysis of moves in civil, software and biomedical engineering to determine whether TOCs offer a viable alternative to the textual analysis of moves in engineering reports.
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